Today’s Divides, Tomorrow’s Opportunities

Volans brings together business, innovators, policy makers, entrepreneurs and others to find market-shaping solutions to address key areas of market failure, bridging—and ultimately beginning to close—10 global divides. As explained in The Power of Unreasonable People, these are:

  • Demographic Divide Image© Still Pictures Demographic: A world of 9 billion people by 2050 will bring almost unimaginable stresses on our economic, social and—above all—ecological systems. Addressing the ‘demographic transition’ will be a central priority. Equally the processes of urbanisation—particularly the spread and proliferation of megacities—will pose new orders of challenge.

  • Financial Divide Image© Still Pictures Financial: Times of radical change often open out existing wealth divides. Among the challenges here will be to bridge (and ultimately begin to close) such divides by increasing financial understanding, creating the preconditions for successful entrepreneurship and making trading and wealth distribution systems radically fairer.

  • Nutritional Divide image© Still Pictures Nutritional: With agricultural, food supply and water provision processes already under growing strain worldwide, our ability to feed an expanded global population is far from guaranteed. A central challenge here will be to provide affordable, high quality nutrition to low-income consumers.

  • Resources Divide Image© Still Pictures Resources: The first decade of the new century has already underscored the developing scramble for natural resources, a process likely to be massively amplified if we turn out to be at or near the ‘Peak Oil’ milestone. A key challenge here will be to account for natural resources in ways that powerfully encourage the transition to renewable, sustainable use by means of improved policy, pricing signals and technology.

  • Environmental Divide Imagephoto: Green Tomato Taxis Environmental: The risk of profound climatic destabilisation has begun to break through into the consciousness of citizens, policy-makers and business leaders, but we have been slow to develop action at the necessary scale. Among the key challenges here will be to evolve market-shaping incentives and disincentives to drive the development and deployment of scalable solutions.

  • health divide image© Still Pictures Health: Each of the factors mentioned above will have a powerful impact on future patterns of health—and the incidence of both acute and chronic disease. A key part of the challenge will be to evolve new business models that combine real commercial opportunity with dramatically improved delivery of healthcare to people who are currently outside the system.

  • Gender Divide Image© Still Pictures Gender: Few divides are as crucial in terms of shifting our societies onto more sustainable paths as the gender divide. Women are disproportionately impacted by most—if not all—of the other divides listed here. The core of the challenge here will be to protect the interests—and equally important harness the power—of the female half of our species.

  • Educational Divide Imagephoto:Aflatoun/Child Savings International Educational: None of the other divides can be successfully understood, let alone tackled, without greater investment in—and use of—educational services at every age level. An understanding of the divides and of the interrelationships between them and our longer term wellbeing should be central to every element of the global curriculum, albeit with a growing emphasis on real-world solutions rather than the problems in isolation.

  • Digital Divide Imagephoto:One Laptop Per Child Digital: Despite the ups and downs of the New Economy era, new digital technologies and related business models are upending one industry sector after another—and their longer term potential for driving economic, social and environmental transformation is increasingly clear. But the ensuring that the right outcomes are achieved, as with all the other divides, is a matter of political will, citizen engagement and the essential business contributions of innovation, entrepreneurship and investment.

  • Security Divide Image© Still Pictures Security: In the wake of the 9/11 attacks definitions of security were radically narrowed, with the result that the links with wider challenges like human rights and climate change were forgotten or actively ignored. Increasingly, leaders in the public, private and citizen sectors will grasp that real security lies in acknowledging the links between all 10 divides—and in evolving and deploying multi-dimensional solutions that genuinely secure the sustainability of our societies.

The first stage of our work will involve developing pilot studies in 2-3 of these areas.

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